Time traveling idiots

[Don]

So I'm still watching this Korean soap opera about how some doctor time traveled back to the yuan dynasty, so currently this doctor found this letter written to herself that says, "Hello soandso, on some day where some dude broke the vest watch out for that man". It was obviously written by future self that send the letter further back in time so they'd hand it to her in the yuan dynasty, and it turned out on a certain date the guy he's in love with is going to get killed in an ambush. Okay so maybe her future self wasn't sure about the calendar, but why not put like '(name of guy) is going to walk into an ambush and die'. So of course the girl can't figure out what the heck this means and barely had enough time to get into the ambush as it's happening due to one of those random flashback scenes. This reminds me one of those Mortal Kombat game where Raiden sent a message of "He must win" back to his past self who had no idea what the heck that's supposed to mean. Maybe these guys should consult Biff, who sent back in time the sports almanac and a gun to shoot the guy who's going to take that almanac back. Based on the way these fiction goes, you'd think it'd be pretty hard to do something mundane like make a million dollars with a time machine on yourside, because 'buy Microsoft to $X, Google to $Y, and Apple to $Z" is clearly too hard to send back as a message to your past self.

[kali o.]

Lol...your mind is a strange and wonderful place.

I'll take a quick visit - if they guy is named (or place, date, etc) it could unduly influence future actions, unexpectedly throwing the entire timeline off, to a degree the original "person" does not want. By keeping it vague, it helps ensure only the incident itself can possibly be altered. This of course assumes we are not running into The Time Machine rules, where changing events is not actually possible due to a temporal paradox (No, Emma, No!!). Uhhh, lost my train of thought....gonna go watch Back to the Future though --- it's stuck in my brain now.

[Don]

I'd think you'll just end up like how after Doc found out he was going to get shot in the future he decided screw temporal paradoxes and wore a bulletproof vest.

[SineSwiper]

Not enough material does the "infinite timelines" model of time travel. The one where you can shoot your grandfather because you've just started a new timeline. I think Butterfly Effect followed those rules, because in the end, he couldn't really go back to his exact timeline.

[Don]

Infinite timeline isn't exactly rare. Dragonball uses such a model because sending Trunks back in time could not have prevented his timeline from being destroyed by Cell.

I really like Doraemon's time travel model, even though it's written for elementary school students. In Doraemon all individuals protected by the doctrine of inevitability will never be affected by past events that attempts to wipe them out, which is crucial since in the first chapter Nobita correctly asks that if his great-great-great-great-great-greeatson sent Doraemon back in time so that he can have a more successful life, wouldn't the fact that if this worked then his future descendent would never have sent Doraemon back in time or even be born? But there's no such problem because Doraemon and his descendent are both protected by the doctrine of inevitability so it doesn't matter. Ironically Nobita, the main character, is not so he's constantly doing the Marty McFly thing of accidentally erasing his existence by interfering with his parent's past but his descendent are always going to be around even if he never existed. In fact in one of the arcs Earth was destroyed by aliens but Doraemon is not affected by the fact that anyone who could've built him in the 22nd century is now dead! No they never explained why this is true, but that makes the time traveling stuff a lot easier to cope.

[SineSwiper]

I'm trying to get into Steins;Gate, but the characters can be so braindead about how this shit works. Everybody knows about the Butterfly Effect. It doesn't need to be explained. However, they seem to disprove it by making grand sweeping changes that affect things around them, but not actually affect his lab partners at all.

Yeah, let's change something 20 years ago, but the only thing that actually changed was the thing you were trying to change, which was a person's gender! Sure, somehow change a person's gender, but everything else is the same, including the friends they hang out with.

Changes from one week ago or one day ago, I can understand that having a specific impact. But it was really stretching my suspension of disbelief. I've gone through just under half of the series, but I'm not sure if I'm going to finish.

[Don]

That sounds like a story where aliens kidnapped some guy when he/she was young and operated on him and somehow nobody ever figured out that the person has been changed, and the only reason time travel was used was because time travel sounds cooler than abducted by aliens.